roy williams
@roywilliams
Designer, manager, writer, theorist, visualiser.
Retired from full-time work, developing visual platforms for collaboration
researchgate.netroy williams
On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales
The document explores how scalability, the ability to expand without changing the framework, has shaped modern projects, economies, and knowledge, leading to a loss of transformative diversity.
Scalability
Does it mean spread? Taking up space? The space of ‘others’?
Surely scalability can mean an increase in connection, contact, non-‘GDP’ growth?
Diversity is growth, no? Emergent (complex-adaptive emergence, if you really want to know) is embedded in diversity, indistinguishable from it.
And does precision have to be malevolent? Surely not ... (emergent precision, anyone?)
Having worked with emergence, and emergent learning, (for some years) which is simply ‘ordered but not predictable’ (or the world of unruly variables) I would think not.
Of course, it is possible to shoe-horn (violence of the metaphor intended) precision and scalability into obedient variables, but that is to discount the whole of organic life, which happens to include us (H. ‘sapiens’) and most of the ‘critters’ on this planet.
I guess that depends on whether you like change or not. And even more so on whether you value adapting to change, not just change in scale, but in essence.